When President Donald Trump signed a September proclamation imposing a $100,000 fee on all new H-1B visa petitions, he called it a step toward “protecting American workers.” But higher-education leaders and labor economists warn that the move could do the opposite, accelerating a decline in international student enrollment and choking the pipeline that connects American universities to this country’s highly skilled labor force.
“This is certainly a hurdle,” said Peter Ciurczak, a senior research analyst at the Boston Foundation’s Boston Indicators project. “We’ve already seen some drop-off on the student level and the H-1B level even before those fees went into effect, because it’s much more difficult to value the proposition nowadays. I think we’ll probably just see an extension of the trends we’ve already seen.”
The $100,000 surcharge, effective Sept. 21 and applicable to all new petitions, including the 2026 lottery, sent shockwaves through higher education and industry. Universities have long relied on the H-1B visa as a post-graduation bridge for international students to stay and work in America. Economists caution that making that bridge prohibitively expensive will reshape who chooses to study here in the first place.
For decades, international students have been an economic and intellectual engine for American universities. Now, their numbers are stalling.
“The changes are reducing the attractiveness of American universities,” said Theodore C. Landsmark, a distinguished professor of public policy and urban affairs at Northeastern University and director of the Kitty and Michael Dukakis Center for Urban and Regional Policy. “A student from India or China who is looking for a particular kind of education is going to be considerably more attracted to schools in Europe or Canada at this point because of the uncertainties that exist.”
“The State Department is supposed to release monthly visa issuances, but they just stopped coming out after May,” Ciurczak said. “That’s probably indicative of something not going on, some sort of data not coming through, but I couldn’t tell you exactly how and why.”
Without those reports, analysts have only fragments to work with. According to The Chronicle of Higher Education, August arrivals of international students fell 20% from 2024, the steepest decline outside the pandemic, while the total number of student visa holders in September ticked up less than 1%. To Ciurczak, the decline is a warning sign that deeper disruptions are already underway.
For Mindy Marks, an associate professor of economics at Northeastern, the logic is simple.
“Econ 101 says that if you increase the price of anything, demand will fall,” she said. “The H-1B fees are no different; the costs are going to go up, and someone has to eat that cost. As a result, there will be fewer highly skilled international workers in the economy.”
The new fee, she added, acts as a gatekeeping tax.
“If hiring an international faculty member suddenly costs $100,000, universities won’t do it unless they’re hiring a Nobel laureate,” Marks said. “It’s like saying you can build a major league football team, but you’re only allowed to recruit players born in Iowa. You could do it, but it won’t be as good.”
At universities like Northeastern, ranked second in the U.S. for international student enrollment, the consequences extend beyond economics.
“We are becoming a really fine university because of the diversity of our students and the contributions they make to our classroom discussions,” Landsmark said. “To the extent that we are constrained in terms of who can be here and who can contribute, we’re losing out on a richness that our president has certainly intended by moving the university toward a more global stance.”
In October, the U.S. Department of Education began circulating a new compact among universities outlining a set of conditions in exchange for federal benefits, including a provision that would cap international students at 15% of total undergraduate enrollment.
For institutions that have built global identities, Landsmark warned, such limits would “reduce the prospects of achieving peace and understanding” that universities are designed to foster.
The fee hike, experts say, is part of a larger shift toward “policy by process,” using administrative complexity as a form of restriction.
“That’s pretty fundamental,” Ciurczak said. “The interviews have changed for student visas. They’re doing deep dives into social media now. There’s a lot of emphasis on intangibles like ‘comportment’ — are you a good fit for the United States as defined by the Trump administration — which may or may not reflect student achievement in any meaningful way.”
Marks sees the same pattern in H-1B screening. “If we think of the visa as a license, there’s always a trade-off,” she said. “You can do a really good job of keeping out anyone you don’t want, but you’ll also block a lot of people you actually do want.”
The result, she added, is exclusion disguised as process.
“You can use these kinds of requirements as tools to exclude, a form of rent-seeking. The group in charge wants to keep the good stuff for themselves.”
For states like Massachusetts, which depend on international students to power their innovation economy, the stakes are immediate. Ciurczak described it as “almost a labor question as much as an immigration question,” noting that industries like biotech and clean energy depend on the student-to-H-1B pipeline to stay competitive.
Marks warned that universities could experience the effects just as acutely. If fewer international students enroll, she said, schools will face “either lower-quality applicants or smaller programs,” threatening both intellectual and financial vitality.
Landsmark sees something larger at risk, noting that “universities are a common ground for bringing together diverse cultures,” and that limiting who can be on campuses narrows “the opportunities for learning, conciliation and peacemaking on a global level.”
For now, the $100,000 fee is officially framed as a one-time cost intended to upskill the H-1B system. But to those watching the numbers, the message is simpler: The world’s most sought-after students may no longer see America as worth the price of admission.